Saturday, February 8

Reading: Lady of Mazes, Karl Schroeder (arrived at via this Jo
Walton piece) and his earlier Ventus after finishing that.

The former is an ambitious piece of work that tries to grapple with a lot of ideas
and possibilities at once: The way that technology conditions culture, the
nature of identity, posthumanity and its discontents, coordination of action in
a vast, system-spanning meta-society.

There’s a certain class of what I’ll call Anything Can Happen Space Opera where
characters who are kind of terrible people bounce around through all these
crazy scenes being miserable. It always puts me in mind of the effect you’d
get if you took a pack of existentially troubled teenagers and dumped them for
500 pages into some terribly stupid mine-carts-and-conveyor-belts CGI sequence
from one of the Star Wars prequels. (Which I guess probably already had
Anakin Skywalker in it, but mercifully I have forgotten most of the details.)
Take, for example, Colin Greenland’s Take Back Plenty, which has some
extraordinary moments, and which I wanted to like, but which felt like about
60% of its material was whiny people being terrible to each other when it
wasn’t whiny people engaged in slapdash chase antics through baroque but
shallow scenery.

Mazes isn’t that – in fact it’s pretty good – but it has some of that
flavor, a flavor it shares with the less-interesting bits of Stross’s
Accelerando and all the parts of Consider Phlebas I managed to consume
before I gave up on all the shit-wallowing torture porn.

I’m starting to think that talking about futures whose defining quality is an
absence of constraints just sort of naturally leads to this kind of thing, at
least for people embedded in the cultural matrix of 1990s-2000s mass humanity.
Which is to say that Lady of Mazes is interesting because it’s trying to talk
directly about some of the very phenonema that make it hard to write really
satisfying books like Lady of Mazes.

Half way through the book, I’ve been getting more actual reading enjoyment out
of Ventus, I think because it’s operating with a narrower focus, working out
the details of a particular set of constraints, exploring a handful of ideas.
It’s not entirely self-consistent, but it’s got me hooked on knowing the outcome,
anyway.